Alix Vernet
Inside window air conditioners and industrial units that punctuate New York’s fire escapes and rooftops, gleaming aluminum condenser coils mediate the exchange between interior and exterior climates. In LANDMARKS, these condensers are installed throughout the gallery as a loose field of freestanding columns and wall-based reliefs, weathered and deformed, like the contemporary ruins of industrial infrastructure and its attempts to regulate the movement of air.
This exhibition grew out of the artist’s time spent in New York making casts of architectural façades and letterforms, a central thread in her practice for years. Working on fire escapes for hours at a time, Vernet found herself increasingly drawn to the backs of the air conditioners projecting into the street, where reflective aluminum buckles into folds resembling drapery or weathered relief sculpture, while stacked units assume the quiet authority of standing stones or civic monuments. As crushed aluminum fins catch and scatter light in the gallery, exposed copper tubing reads like an external circulatory system. Existing abrasions sit alongside new marks made by equally tactile means as she translates fragments of actual monuments, civic signage, and public typography into custom stencils, pressed and scratched into the aluminum in a process that borrows the physical logic of stone carving.
Removed from the machines that once concealed them, the condensers are indexical records of the city’s life, more like photographs than readymades, through an amalgam of dust particles, elemental reactions, maintenance routines, and moisture cycles normally hidden from view. Throughout her practice, Vernet attends to the surfaces, appearances, and disappearances embedded in the built environment, including the labor and care that quietly sustain them. Bearing accumulated scratches, smudges, graffiti, and the occasional imprint of a palm or fingers, the condensers carry the city’s inscriptions while refusing holistic representation.
The words themselves are gathered from overheard conversations, street signs, monuments, and chance encounters across the city. Approaching illegibility, the texts dissolve into the condensers’ mesh grids until language begins to flicker, like the city itself, felt in passing but never quite captured. Compressing a bulk of time and movement rather than arresting an instantaneous moment, the condensers also become less like pictorial documents, in the end, than aura photographs: not mystical portraits of some singular essence, but registers of the thermal, atmospheric, social, and celestial exchanges that continually reshape the built environment’s surfaces. Surfaces, for her, are not flat images or representations laid over the world, but embodied events formed through contact with it, in measurements that don’t subscribe to any metric system we know.
Alix Vernet (b. 1997, Denver, CO) lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2026 and a BA from UCLA in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Market Gallery, New York, and Helena Anrather, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Anton Kern, New York; Kiang Malingue, New York; Chapter NY; Francois Ghebaly, New York; Museion, Bolzano, IT; the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; and Soft Opening, London, UK. She is the 2026 recipient of the Worthlessstudios Artist Residency Program.